This invention relates to the laying of wire and in particular to a tool capable of use in the laying of wire in the production of a wiring harness with the aid of a wiring loom table.
More particularly the present invention concerns a wire-laying tool which is capable of use in conjunction with a wire-laying robot, such as is mentioned in our European Patent Application No. 80301087.2 for the purpose of laying wire in the production of a wiring harness in the manner described in, for example, our British Patent Specification No. 2025272 and our British Patent Application No. 8109431 of even date herewith. Those methods form no part of the present invention. However, they have the common characteristic of a loom table which consists of, among other things, a wire mesh into which a programmed robot places, using a suitable gripping tool, a multiplicity of pins in a pattern appropriate for the particular harness which is to be made. The harness usually consists of a multiplicity of wires which start and terminate in respective positions but over a considerable portion of their lengths are laid along a common path. In the co-pending British patent application of even date herewith we describe a method of production in which when the pins have been laid out in the desired pattern, some of them are provided with rubber collars so that when the wires are laid adjacent to pins having rubber collars the wires are supported clear of the topmost mesh of the wiring table. For this purpose the robot exchanges the tool which is used for laying pins for another adapted for picking up the rubber collars and depositing those rubber collars over the relevant pins. Thereafter the robot exchanges that tool for another tool which is adapted for the laying of wire. This tool, which is preferably constituted by a tool according to the present invention, is, for each wire in the harness, fed with a metered length of wire and is then moved by the robot so that for each wire the leading end is wound round a "start" pin, then the balance of the wire is laid along the programmed path appropriate for that wire and finally the wire is wound around a final pin. This operation is repeated for each wire. Subsequently, the wiring harness is removed from the table, preferably by inversion of the table, which is then ready, on reinversion to be rewired with another, similar harness. At the end of a run of production of a multiplicity of harnesses, the table is finally inverted and, as described in our British Patent Specification No. 2025272, two meshes in the table are separated to remove the pins from the table.